19 November 2011 11:28 PM

Civlian juntas have seized power in Rome and Athens. Soon, similar gangs of grey men may be sweeping aside national governments in Madrid and Lisbon. Nobody much is protesting. In time – don’t rule it out – it could be our turn here, with Lords Patten and Mandelson forming a cabinet of none of the talents.

Our ruling Left-wing elite seem oddly untroubled by the ruthless snuffing-out of national sovereignty across southern Europe. If the same thing had been done by a bunch of colonels, they would have been piously outraged.

But of course these putsches are the work of the European Union, a project the Left have long supported. And the EU is more subtle than any colonels. There is no need for midnight arrests or tanks on the streets. The enormous invisible power of the EU’s law and institutions gets its way without any need for such things.

The sheer dictatorial nerve of Italy’s new viceroy, Mario Monti, pictured right, is impressive. He has formed a government without a single elected politician in it.

You may well say that Italy’s politicians are, like ours, a sorry collection of blowhards and amateurs. But that does not mean they should be replaced by something worse – robots under the command of the EU Commission.

Once again, please pay close attention. This is the best warning you will ever get of what the EU is really about. It is an empire, in which the great nations of Europe, including ours, are intended to disappear for ever.

It has from the start been based on a grave mistake – the idea that national differences and independence no longer matter and are obsolete. It is this mistake which led it into creating the mad single currency that is now ruining it. But people who are driven by ideals can seldom see when they are wrong.

You and I may grasp that the euro has failed, as we always knew it would. But in the high councils of Euroland, they are unable to recognise this blazingly obvious reality.

Inside their tiny, deluded world it is all the other way round. The euro is a sparkling success that must be kept alive at all costs. So is the European Union. We must march onward towards ever-closer union, even if it is so close that it suffocates us to death. In the minds of Chancellor Merkel and President Sarkozy, those to blame for the present problems are the countries that have inexplicably gone bankrupt, or the ones who are about to do so.

Their peoples must undergo collective punishment for their failure, and be driven mad by useless austerity programmes that devastate their countries while failing to dent their debt.

They must submit to direct rule from Brussels, no longer allowed even to pretend that they are independent.

It will be painful to see how much treasure will now be squandered on trying to fend off reality.

But, as Britain learned during John Major’s Exchange Rate Mechanism crisis, you cannot keep out the ocean with a garden fence.

When all this is over – and let it be soon – it seems increasingly likely that several countries will have been forced out of the euro.

This country may have been strong-armed into imposing a ruinous EU-mandated tax.

Heaven knows what Germany will have to swallow. The sad thing is that, even after the turmoil, the waste and the pain, the major British political parties will continue to insist that this country should stay in the EU.

Why do they do this? There has never been any good reason for us to belong. There are now hundreds of reasons why we should leave.

When will we get a leadership with the courage to say so, and act accordingly?

The Cenotaph lout proves jail sentences are a fraud

Charlie Gilmour, in a drugged and drunken rage of self-righteousness, desecrated our most revered memorial to the fallen.

A judge ‘sentenced’ him to 16 months in prison. A number of silly female commentators, fooled by Gilmour’s carefully styled courtroom appearance in which he dressed as HarryPotter, whimpered soppily about the savagery of the Bench.

Gilmour’s mother Polly Samson and rich, rock-star adoptive father David Gilmour mounted a costly appeal and let it be known they thought it was all terribly unfair and out of proportion. Given the rock industry’s long-term role in promoting drugs, and the fact the younger Gilmour’s brain was ablaze with LSD at the time of his crime, it seems to me they would have been wiser to stay silent.

Now, after serving a paltry four months of his sentence, the Cenotaph Swinger emerges from jail with a hard-man haircut (this will be by choice – it is many years since prisoners were compulsorily cropped), a sulky face and a roll-up fag behind his ear, very different from the meek, lost boy we were shown at the trial.

And to those who say that prison doesn’t teach anybody anything, I would only reply that Charlie Gilmour now knows precisely what the Cenotaph looks like, and exactly where it is – and so do lots of other people who will think twice before using it as an adventure playground in future.

What we have also learned, alas, is that prison sentences are even more fraudulent than they were. Criminals used to serve half of the term stated. Now it seems to be only a quarter.

A 'spy chief' with no intelligence

I am not sure what use Eliza Manningham-Buller ever was. MI5, which she somehow came to lead, is a bloated and expensive collection of plods which feeds on our fears and could probably be abolished tomorrow without any of us being less safe.

I always laughed when she was called a ‘spy chief’, as if MI5 was the same as the marginally more glamorous MI6, which does actually employ some spies. One thing she knows nothing about is drugs. She thinks there is a ‘war on drugs’ and that it has ‘failed’. So the obvious solution is to ‘decriminalise’ dope.

The same hogwash has gushed from the mouths of various other airhead celebrities and ex-Ministers.

As I have repeatedly recorded here, cannabis use in this country is effectively decriminalised already, with most offences being dealt with by an unrecorded warning. Nor is this new. In February 1994, John O’Connor, former head of the Scotland Yard Flying Squad, said: ‘Cannabis is a decriminalised drug.’

It is because we have given up the fight against it that the correlation between cannabis use and mental illness is now worrying our psychiatrists so much. A security service whose ex-chief doesn’t even know these basic facts can’t be much good, can it?

Our security is going for a song

I am still amazed that this Government gets good marks for competence on defence. The US Navy and US Marines are to buy the 74 Harrier jets which were so stupidly scrapped by the supposed Conservative Liam Fox.

They cannot believe their luck. ‘We’re taking advantage of all the money the Brits have spent on them,’ says American Admiral Mark Heinrich. ‘It’s like buying a car with maybe 15,000 miles on it.’

It’s plain who is the loser in this deal.

Tories are a joke to Dave

I do wonder what David Cameron says in private about Patrick Mercer, who was so rude about the Premier the other day.

Actually, I don’t wonder at all. Mr Cameron must spend long minutes every evening laughing at all the traditional Tories who continue so foolishly to vote for him.

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13 May 2009 5:03 PM

Hardened as I am to the absurd behaviour of the semi-official media, I have seldom heard or seen such an amazing collective missing of a major story - and such a collective effort to protect a public figure and a political party from harm - as has taken place in the last three days.

On Monday, and then again on Tuesday, a former Chairman of the Conservative Party urged Conservative voters to withdraw their votes from that party at the coming European Parliament elections.

Nor was this some titular figure of whom nobody had heard. It was Lord Tebbit, once known as Norman Tebbit, a much-celebrated former Cabinet Minister who - if the IRA had not severely injured him and even more severely hurt his wife during their attempt to massacre the entire Cabinet in Brighton - might well have become Prime Minister. Many of you will remember the moving (and typical) stoicism he displayed as he was rescued, agonisingly, from the ruins on live TV. Thanks to that same stoicism, few of you will know how much pain, physical and emotional, he has endured since, not least because it was his wife who suffered so much more than he. So I'll just mention it here. You may have guessed that I rather like him.

In fact I would go so far as to say that Lord Tebbit is probably the single most significant survivor of the Thatcher government, and the man who speaks most cogently for the traditional Conservative voter, still loyal, but increasingly dismayed and puzzled by his party's direction.

His decision (taken, I have no doubt, after much thought) to urge Tories to withhold their votes from the Tory Party is news by anybody's measure. It is somebody important doing something he is a) not expected to do and b) not supposed to do. I can confess that I tried very hard to make him do something of the kind when I interviewed him for my Channel Four programme about David Cameron. He wouldn't oblige. You can criticise your party from within, but to urge people not to vote for it tends to be an unforgivable sin and an expulsion offence.

Nor is it the result of a secret briefing, which can later be denied. It was done, more than once, on the record. The Daily Mail carried it on Tuesday morning, and the BBC Radio Four Today programme then got him to repeat it on air in a recorded interview - though in a bizarre mess-up which has caused the BBC some embarrassment, 'Today' managed to cut a crucial section out of its recording - the section in which Lord Tebbit made it clear that he also strongly (and rightly) advised voters to stay away from the repellent BNP rabble.

Yes, of course I rejoiced over this. For the first time, a genuine crack has appeared in the facade of the Tory Party, which all insiders know to be profoundly split. It appeared on the same day that a Populus Poll in The Times showed Tory and Labour support plummeting side by side as a result of the expenses revelations engulfing both parties.

There's been a lot of silly argument (familiar to me) about whether Lord Tebbit was secretly urging people to vote for UKIP. Why do people find it so hard to believe that not voting for your former party is itself a powerful political act, highly effective on its own, and that no alternative vote is necessary? Not voting can be an extremely potent form of protest.

More interesting is his very narrow condition - that his advice should apply only to the European vote, not to local elections or to the next General Election. Others will have to judge, or Lord Tebbit will have to say, whether this is a sustainable position, and whether disgust can be contained in so small an area. In fact it's quite clever, since the EU elections, being held under proportional representation and in regions, are much more open to changes in public opinion than first-past-the-post polls. If the Tories do unexpectedly badly, UKIP will be the beneficiaries whether Tory dissidents vote for them or not, and Lord Tebbit will be able to take credit for it (and take the blame and fury from the Cameroons). Lord Tebbit cannot fail to realise that, however narrow his specific advice is, a trickle of this kind can swiftly turn into a torrent. In current conditions, when the credit and standing of all established MPs is exhausted, who can say where it might end?

Why was this enormous story not at the very least near the top of every bulletin and every front page yesterday? Why was the bizarre non-story, that David Cameron was (understandably but predictably) trying to minimise the damage done by the revelations of his own party's greed, both pushed to the front and treated with such reverence. Why wouldn't he? It would have been news if he hadn't. It wasn't news that he did. It's his job and he is, after all, a PR man by profession. But this predictable and obvious action was treated as if he had single-handedly rescued a group of menaced women from the hands of the Janjaweed in Darfur, or scaled Kanchenjunga without oxygen.

Even the left-wing 'Independent' carried a leading article on Wednesday saying how decisive etc Mr Cameron had been. Had he? Had he sacked anyone? No. Was he himself super-clean? No. He had, in effect, ordered himself to pay back money he shouldn't have claimed for repairs to his conservatory. Conservatory? Honestly, how could anyone have ever thought it was the taxpayer's job to fix his conservatory? I shall return to this at the weekend, but it simply isn't a surprising or unexpected story that the leader of a wounded party seeks to stem the damage done to it by a swirling scandal. Gordon Brown was likewise seeking to stem the damage done to his party, but his efforts were rightly considered to be of minor importance and not specially impressive. Nor were Mr Cameron's. So why the difference in coverage?

My new book 'The Broken Compass', explains how political journalism operates in this country, and I do urge those who are interested to get hold of a copy. But in brief, two forces are operating here. One, the liberal elite actively wish for a Tory government, which they see as the best hope of safeguarding the left-wing policies of Blairism and two, many ambitious journalists have invested a great deal of time, and many lunches, in making close contacts with the Tory leadership. Now they want their pay-off, in the form of a future close relationship with a Tory government.

The other interesting story about Norman Tebbit is: ‘Why didn't David Cameron move to expel or at least suspend him from the Conservative Party?’

This is not explored because the answer is: ‘He didn't dare.’ And journalists in the liberal elite don't want to write such a story, as it reflects discredit on their chosen hero. Remember Michael Howard's disgraceful sacking of Howard Flight, or Mr Cameron's equally wrong dismissal of Patrick Mercer from his front bench, (both recently defended to me, very vigorously, by a certain Cameroon A-List candidate)? Norman Tebbit is much bigger than them, and remains a canny and quick-thinking political operator. In any fight between them, Cameron would end up looking like a callow teenager who'd tried to mug an elderly war veteran and been beaten off with a few blows of an umbrella. Also the truth - that Mr Cameron has hijacked the Tory Party for the liberal cause - would be shockingly evident. In my view, Lord Tebbit could actually have gone quite a lot further and got away with it. I hope he does.

13 March 2007 11:20 AM

Two things remain to be said about the Stalinist purge of the Tory MP Patrick Mercer by the Cameron machine, which I discussed at length in my Mail on Sunday column.

One is to ask why Mr Mercer, who now has nothing to expect from the Tory leadership but a lifetime of blighted ambition on the backbenches, so willingly accepted his banishment and repudiation. It seems to me he has nothing to lose by defending himself and attacking the leader who so cravenly dumped him rather than defend freedom of speech. All the obligations he had to that leader ended when he was treated as he was.

Party loyalty has always struck me as an odd thing. Why should one be loyal to an organisation founded on cynical compromise and held together by ambition? It is not a beloved old school, or a family, or a regiment or even a club - just a temporary alliance of convenience designed to seek office.

Mr Mercer was stamped on for being inconvenient, not for being wrong or wicked. This brings me to my second point. He was sacrificed on the altar of the BBC, which in return will continue its amazing love affair with the Cameroon Tory Party. Used as I have been for decades to the BBC's undisguised hostility to the Tories, its refusal often even to mention their opinions, let alone give a fair crack to its spokesmen, its attempt to build up the 'Liberal Democrats' as the main opposition, I never cease to be amazed by the exaggerated respect with which Mr Cameron's party is now treated.

Some dim people seem to see this as a rediscovery of impartiality by the BBC. It is nothing of the kind, as Robin Aitken found when he wrote his book attacking BBC bias, and then mysteriously found himself not being invited on to any of the Corporation's many programmes that discuss books of this kind.

In fact it is the best proof that the Cameroons are in fact the heirs to Blair, that the BBC - the magisterium of official liberal opinion in this country - can now stomach the idea of a Tory government and so treats the Tories, for the first time since about 1979, as a legitimate political body.

You'll note also how the story degenerated from a force 12 hurricane on Thursday to nothing by Monday, when once a 'race' row in the Tory party would have raged for at least a week, and on this occasion Mr Mercer had several powerful defenders. That's a sign of how most political journalists, too, have bought shares in a Cameron government. Your opinions? Nobody cares about them.

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Global warming scare.

I believe Channel Four's excellent programme on 'the Great Global Warming Swindle' can now be found on the web, and also obtained as a DVD. Google will I am sure help you locate these resources. I urge all readers to try to see that this programme is shown in schools, where children are subjected to endless biased propaganda on this contentious issue.